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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations

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The big news from last week was the release of the spring edition of the twice-yearly Unified Agenda, which lists all planned agency regulations currently in the pipeline. Wayne Crews offers his take here and here. The 2018 Federal Register also zoomed past the 20,000-page mark, adding more than 10 percent to its total page count last week. New rules range from menu labeling to sea turtle observers.

On to the data:

Last week, 78 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 63 the previous week.

That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 9 minutes.

Federal agencies have issued 1,169 final regulations in 2018. At that pace, there will be 3,177 new final regulations. Last year’s total was 3,281 regulations.

Last week, 2,270 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,177 pages the previous week.

The 2018 Federal Register totals 22,170 pages. It is on pace for 60,245 pages. The all-time record adjusted page count (which subtracts skips, jumps, and blank pages) is 96,994, set in 2016.

Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Two such rules have been published this year, one in the last week.